In July, 1813, Byron broke the ultimate sexual taboo—incest—by seducing his married half sister, Augusta Leigh. Reared separately, the two children born to Capt. John “Mad Jack” Byron rediscovered each other with an intense passion. Nine months and two weeks later, Augusta gave birth to a daughter, Medora, and a proud Byron left little doubt as to the father. Referring to the belief held in the Middle Ages that incestuous intercourse produced monsters, he wrote Lady Melbourne that “it is not an ape, and if it is, that must be my fault.” To silence the malicious gossip that his open affection for Augusta had created, Byron married Annabella Milbanke, a prim and scholarly heiress who believed she could reform him. Their one-year marriage was a total disaster. Byron became almost psychotic, verbally taunting her for months with embellished stories of his past orgies. He suffered continual nightmares, awakening at the slightest body contact with Annabella, screaming, “Don’t touch me!” or crying out, “Good God, I am surely in hell!” in his dim awareness of the red damask curtains around the huge four-poster and the flickering tapers he kept burning in the bedroom. Since Byron felt “a woman should never be seen eating or drinking,” Annabella took her meals alone. In December, after the birth of their daughter, Augusta Ada, a fearful Lady Byron fled and sued for a legal separation. The ensuing scandal feasted upon rumors about Byron’s sexual perversions: e.g., he’d made love to the aging Lady Melbourne at her request; he’d sodomized his terrified wife in the final month of her pregnancy; he’d attempted to rape Lady Oxford’s 13-year-old daughter. The sensational charges, which were viciously helped along by a vengeful Lady Caroline bent on Byron’s ruin, ostracized him so completely that he was forced to leave England for good on Apr. 25, 1816, his reputation in shreds. But in his final month, Byron “put it about” (his adopted term for copulating) one last time, with Claire Clairmont, the plain 17-year-old stepdaughter of free-love advocate William Godwin. Attracted by Byron’s notoriety, Claire brazenly propositioned him in a series of provocative letters. Drawn by her persistent suggestions that he use her body at his earliest convenience, Byron finally gave in a week before departure. Their brief coupling produced Allegra, born the following January.
Once an expatriate in Venice, Byron resumed his sexual excesses in earnest. He found rooms near St. Mark’s Square and immediately took his landlord’s wife, dark-eyed Marianna Segati, as his next mistress. Almost simultaneously, he acquired a second partner, the Junoesque (5 ft. 10 in.) baker’s wife Margarita Cogni. The fiery amazon’s explosive jealousy forced Byron to schedule his other assignations very carefully. Although very religious—she crossed herself every time prayer bells rang, even when making love with Byron—Margarita would have stabbed any rival caught in her lover’s bed. In 1818 Byron broke with Marianna and rented the Palazzo Mocenigo. The palace doubled as a personal brothel for Byron, populated by a harem of mistresses and streetwalkers. For a time his gentle “tigress,” Margarita—secure in her role as the poet’s primary mistress—served as housekeeper, but her temper tantrums proved too much for Byron to accept. When Byron asked her to leave, she threatened him with a knife and stabbed his hand. She then threw herself into the canal. Finally convinced that Byron no longer wanted her, she returned to her husband.
Byron once estimated that almost half of his annual expenses had gone for purchased sex, parceled out to at least 200 women. “Perhaps more,” he wrote, “for I have not lately kept the count.” The orgies were not without additional cost. Byron was plagued by gonorrhea, the “curse of Venus” having been passed along by his ladies.
In April, 1819, tiring of endless promiscuity and growing fat, Byron met Teresa Guiccioli, a 19-year-old countess trapped in a marriage of convenience. He became her cavalier servente, fulfilling the role of official public escort as allowed by Italian custom for such marriages. Privately, the two fell genuinely in love. Byron cut down sharply on his sexual prowling, writing friends that he had “not had a whore this half year,” and had confined himself “to the strictest adultery.” At Count Guiccioli’s invitation, Byron moved in under the same roof, thereby simplifying the affair. Eventually, however, Guiccioli tired of the arrangement, and after an emotional confrontation Teresa was granted a separation. Ironically, the four-year affair domesticated Byron almost completely, and he wistfully pictured himself as a living example of conjugal happiness. Teresa and Byron lived together until July, 1823, when he left for Greece.
—W.K.
The Lover’s Love
GIOVANNI JACOPO CASANOVA (Apr. 2, 1725 -June 4, 1798)
HIS FAME: His name has come down in history as a synonym for a great lover. He was also a gambler, writer, and practitioner of the occult, as well as an escape artist and inveterate traveler, who lived and loved by his wits.
HIS LIFE: “I was not born a nobleman—I achieved nobility,” declared Casanova, who was sensitive about his antecedents. His mother was a promiscuous young Venetian actress, Zanetta Farussi, who married a dancer named Casanova; his father, he believed, was Michele Grimani of the patrician theatrical family. (His brother Francesco is said to have been fathered by the Prince of Wales, the future George II, while Zanetta Casanova was on tour in England.) He was raised by his grandmother, boarding out as a student at the University of Padua, from which he received a doctorate in law at the age of 17. After being expelled from a seminary for alleged homosexual activity, Casanova eventually made his way into the Venetian army.
At 21, having acquired a knowledge of the healing arts and the occult, Casanova nursed back to health an aging Venetian aristocrat named Matteo Bragadin, who adopted him in gratitude. Incarcerated in Venice’s Leads Prison for various peccadilloes—many of them sexual in nature—Casanova escaped to spend the next 18 years wandering all over Europe. He was a compulsive gambler who served briefly as organizer of the French state lottery; a litterateur who translated the Iliad and wrote many books, including a prophetic novel in five volumes. He visited Voltaire in Switzerland, fought a duel with a Polish count, interviewed Russia’s Catherine the Great (about calendar reform), and affected the title of Chevalier de Seingalt.
Returning to Venice in 1774, Casanova served the Inquisition as a spy and bureaucrat for seven years, until he was exiled for writing a satire on the Venetian ruling classes. He ended his life as librarian to Count von Waldstein in a castle in Dux, Bohemia.
HIS PERSON: Tall, dark, and powerfully built, with the witty manner of a Harlequin or a Figaro, Casanova possessed the ability to insinuate himself into every picaresque possibility. His sexual conquests were legion. “There was not a woman in the world who could resist constant attentions,” he claimed. A Machiavelli of sexual intrigue, he would court, cajole, scheme, insult, and threaten until he got his way; rebuffed, his ardor would only increase. Continence caused illness, he thought, whereas indulgence resulted in at least 11 bouts with venereal disease. (Perhaps on this account, but also because he was sympathetic to the woman’s risk of pregnancy, he was familiar with the use of a “protective covering” as well as a contraceptive diaphragm made of half a lemon, the citric acid acting as a spermicide.) A vigorous sexual athlete, he refers casually to “running my sixth race,” and more. In his prime he was capable of having sex anywhere, with anyone, and in any position, with particular reference to the positions described by 16th-century satirist Aretino.
Unlike a Don Juan with a constant need to prove his virility, according to Dr. Robert B. Greenblatt Casanova was a connoisseur of sex who “enjoyed the sexual encounter as much for the pleasure it afforded him as for the satisfaction obtained in the seductive process itself, and in the mystique of the adventure.”
Gourmand as well as connoisseur, Casanova celebrated women with all his senses. “The odor of those I loved was always fragrant to my nostrils,” he wrote. And of course he had a highly developed sense of taste. One of his specialties was the oyster orgy, which involved passing the savory aphrodisiacs from mouth to mouth, retrieving them with his lips should they happen to fall between “alabaster
spheres.”
Above all, Casanova was an incurable romantic who constantly fell in love. “Without love this great business is a vile thing,” he believed. He was forever rescuing damsels in distress, then extricating himself with difficulty. He considered marriage “the tomb of love,” preferring instead the “inexpressible charm of stolen pleasures.” He described these pleasures in exquisite and occasionally fictional detail in the 12-volume Histoire de ma vie (“History of My Life”).
HIS LOVERS IN PARIS: Sexual awakening came when Casanova was 11 or so at the hands of Bettina Gozzi, his landlord’s sister, who, while washing him, touched his thighs suggestively. His first complete sexual experience, six or seven years later, involved not one but two budding young nymphets, Nanetta and Marta Savorgnan. Conspiring to introduce himself into their bed, he lulled them into a deceptive sense of security by feigning sleep. Gradually he uncurled first one girl, then the other, slowly moving toward his ultimate object. After washing together, the three aroused themselves to such a state of sexual intoxication that they spent the remainder of the night “in ever varied skirmishes.”
“With a female friend,” Casanova discovered, “the weakness of the one brings about the fall of the other.” The pattern later repeated itself with Helena and Hedwig, cousins in Geneva. Having pierced their maidenheads and bathed them (an activity that always delighted him), Casanova found his ardor renewed by their curious hands, which aroused him to fill “their cup of happiness for several hours, changing from one to the other five or six times before I… reached the paroxysm of consummation.” Even then, one of the girls was delighted on kissing his “pistol,” as Casanova occasionally referred to his member, to prompt yet another eruption.
HOMOSEXUALITY: In his youth Casanova became obsessed with what he mistakenly believed to be a castrato, one of the young boys playing women’s roles on the Italian stage. “Bellino” turned out to be Teresa, a 16-year-old girl with whom he initiated an affair. Later, unwilling to forgo any new sexual experiences, he indulged in more than one homosexual encounter. Bragadin, Casanova’s adoptive father, may have been a pederast. And in Russia Casanova exchanged “tokens of the tenderest friendship, and swore eternal love” with the beautiful, androgynous Lieutenant Lunin.
LESBIANS AND VOYEURS: “C.C.” (Casanova usually concealed the identity of his lovers) was a 15-year-old who, relieved of her virginity by Casanova, was locked up by her father in the convent at Murano. While visiting her there Casanova caught the eye of Mother “M.M.,” a beautiful young nun with a very catholic libido, who proposed an assignation at her lover’s casino. Their first coupling was staged for the voyeuristic pleasure of M.M.’s lover, Abbé François de Bernis, France’s ambassador to Venice, who was observing them from a hidden chamber. On another occasion, C.C. was persuaded to join M.M. and Casanova. M.M. and C.C. began by exploring “the mysteries of Sappho.” Then “all three of us,” Casanova wrote, “intoxicated by desire … and transported by continual furies, played havoc with everything visible and palpable … freely devouring whatever we saw and finding that we had all become of the same sex in all the trios which we performed.”
Another nun, also referred to as M.M., later seduced a 12-year-old boarder at a French convent for Casanova’s pleasure. By demonstrating the manual technique of verifying virginity, Casanova aroused the child to perform fellatio. She “sucked the quintessence of my soul and my heart,” Casanova related in his memoirs. The entire encounter took place through the grating which separated the nuns from the visitors.
INCEST: “I have never been able to understand how a father could tenderly love his charming daughter without having slept with her at least once,” wrote Casanova, having discovered the pleasures of incest. He had fallen in love with Leonilda, the mistress of a homosexually inclined duke, only to find that she was his daughter by Lucrezia, with whom he had enjoyed copulating marathons 17 years earlier. Leonilda personally observed her parents’ reenactment of her conception, undressing (“saying that as her father I was entitled to see all my handiwork”), and even taking part somewhat in their lovemaking. The relationship between father and daughter was consummated, nine years later, when Leonilda was married to an impotent old marquis and Casanova fathered her son.
SEX FOR FUN AND PROFIT: Casanova had a sense of humor about sex, as evidenced by his affair with “Mlle. X.C.V.” (Giustiniana Wynne). Since the lady was already pregnant, his motives were initially honorable—to help her obtain an abortion. All else having failed, he tried a cure from cabalistic literature: the “aroph of Paracelsus,” a concoction which was to be applied to the mouth of the uterus, by means of an object 6 to 7 in. in length, when the subject was in a state of sexual arousal. Casanova was convulsed with laughter when the moment arrived, but soon recovered enough to achieve repeated penetration if not the abortion.
Casanova’s most elaborate episode of sexual charlatanry involved the widowed Marquise d’Urfé, a rich eccentric whose consuming passion was to be reborn as a male child. He proposed first to impregnate personally an “angelic virgin” with a son, into whom the marquise would breathe her soul. But the “virgin” proved to be more of a trollop, and Casanova was forced to consider the necessity of procreating with the elderly marquise. This would of course require aid and inspiration from a “divine spirit” in the person of Marcoline, actually a lesbian nymphomaniac. Marcoline arrived dressed all in green, with a note in invisible ink introducing her as a water sprite, adept at certain ceremonial ablutions. The marquise failed to bear the desired male child, but she was good for about two years’ worth of pocket money.
LOVERS (CONTINUED) Casanova’s other conquests included the mayoress of Cologne; a nun, a lock of whose pubic hair he kept for remembrance; a black woman, out of curiosity; an actress with two humps on her back and an erotically irregular vulva. Eager to explore all the combinations and permutations of sexual pleasure, he assembled more than one harem of nubile young seamstresses. Most of his women were of the demimonde or lower classes, with a few exceptions. Casanova’s most rewarding affair, according to biographer John Masters, was with a well-bred, well-educated Frenchwoman named Henriette, his equal in adventure and hedonism. They spent three months together before she returned to her home. Years later, Casanova found himself in the same hotel room in Geneva, on the window of which she had scratched with a diamond her fateful farewell message: “Tu oublieras aussi Henriette” (“You will also forget Henriette”).
Exhausted by his prodigious endeavors, Casanova’s sexual potency began to flag before he reached 40. In London in 1763 he resorted to advertising for a companion, was driven to distraction by an unwilling beauty, and was drained of his cash by five mercenary Hanoverian sisters. He began to revisit the same cities, repeating his old conquests. Back in Venice there was an uneducated seamstress, Francesca Buschini, who remained faithful for years. Otherwise, he was forced to frequent the women who could be had by anyone, for a price.
And during the 13 years as a librarian in Bohemia, there were probably no women at all. There were only the pleasures of eating (“since he could no longer be a god in the gardens,” a contemporary wrote, “he had become a wolf at the table”), of writing, and of reading, which prompted an aphorism on his favorite subject: “Woman is like a book which, be it good or bad, must begin to please with its title page.” Needless to say, even though he was impotent during his final years, Casanova was “always curious to read new ones.”
HIS THOUGHTS: “My vices have never burdened anyone but myself, except the cases in which I have seduced; but seduction was never characteristic of me, for I have never seduced except unconsciously, being seduced myself.”
—C.D.
Blond Bombshell
JEAN HARLOW (Mar. 3, 1911-June 7, 1937)
HER FAME: The reigning sex queen of the 1930s, Jean Harlow played comedic movie roles in which she was the platinum-blond floozy with a heart of gold, a “combination good kid and slut.” Among her best-known films are Hell’s Angels,
Dinner at Eight, Public Enemy, Bombshell, and Red Dust.
HER PERSON: Jean was born Harlean Carpenter in Kansas City, Mo. Her mother divorced her dentist husband and two years later married Marino Bello, an Italian-American of uncertain profession with shady gangster connections. Marino and “Mama Jean,” as she was called, managed Jean’s career and leeched large sums of money from her. The family moved to Hollywood when Jean was a teenager, and her first important part was in Hell’s Angels, a fabulously expensive Howard Hughes production. Hughes coined the term “platinum blond” for Harlow (her almost white hair was to become her greatest trademark) and had his costumer design the lowest-cut evening gown ever photographed for the screen. Jean, wearing very little to begin with, caused a sensation when she uttered the immortal line “Do you mind if I slip into something more comfortable?” The next step was to superstardom, although Mama Jean, Marino, and Jean’s friends still called her by her childhood nickname: “the Baby.”
The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People Page 3